Astonishing Things: The Drawings of Victor Hugo
- Kathleen Bondar
- 8 hours ago
- 2 min read
Royal Academy of Arts, Burlington House, Piccadilly, London W1J 0BD
The Jillian and Arthur M. Sackler Wing of Galleries 21 March - 29 June 2025
REVIEW by KATHLEEN BONDAR
Commonly known for his work as the author of Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo was a leading public figure and politician in 19th-century France, advocating the ideals of the French Republic: equality and freedom. Perhaps less known, Victor Hugo was also an artist who inspired Surrealists André Breton and Max Ernst and contemporary artists such as Raymond Pettibon and Antony Gormley RA. Vincent van Gogh described his artwork as “astonishing things” and so the current exhibition at the Royal Academy found its title. In collaboration with Paris Musées, Maison de Victor Hugo and the Bibliothèque Nationale de France the Royal Academy are now exhibiting Hugo’s rarely seen works.
The Cheerful Castle, c. 1847; The Lighthouse at Casquets, Guernsey, 1866; The Town of Vianden, with Stone Cross, 1871
Hugo spent nearly twenty-years exiled in the Channel Islands and for consolation he drew imaginary castles, monsters and seascapes in ink and wash. He shared his drawings with close friends and family. Like his ideas and writing, his art centres on monumental and dramatic themes: ruins, mountains, landscapes and architecture. It’s all very gothic and eerie. The enigmatic drawing Mushroom, 1850 depicts a giant toadstool, reminiscent of an atomic explosion.
Octopus, 1866–69; Chain, 1864; Mirror with Birds, 1870
The RA exhibition is curated thematically into sections. Writing and Drawing is all about the relationship between Hugo’s artistic and literary work. There are drawings relating to Les Misérables, such as Chain, 1864 and The Lighthouse at Casquets. Also Octopus, 1864–66 relates to his novel The Toilers of the Sea, set in Guernsey in the years following the Napoleonic Wars.
The section Fantasy and Reality spotlights Hugo’s obsession with castles. The cheerful castle, c. 1847 is a curious break from his preferred Halloween style such as The Town of Vianden, with Stone Cross, 1871 and The Castle with the Cross, 1850.
Many authors at the time used artists to illustrate their books, so it is perhaps unsurprising a writer with artist talent like Hugo used art to explore his own concepts and ideas. Including spiders, angels, hangings and thrashing seascapes, Astonishing Things helps to bring the mind of one of France's greatest writers into imagery.
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